The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and anti-immigration think-tank, has released a report finding that the U.S. “is currently experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history,” with a foreign-born population of over 31 million in 2000, and that the political implications of this population increase has affected the distribution of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Unlike the Senate, where each state is represented by two senators, in the House of Representatives a state can have one or more representatives, depending on its population, for a total of 435 representatives. Each member of the House represents one congressional district. Every ten years, congressional districts are reapportioned.

Apportionment of districts is based on each state’s total population, which includes illegal aliens and other ‘non-citizens,’ relative to the rest of the United States. In the 2000 census, almost seven million illegal aliens were counted.  While some states with ‘low-immigration’ might seem to be unaffected by immigration, the CIS report shows how they may be losing political influence in Washington, D.C.

The report claims that the presence of ‘non-citizens’, (defined by CIS as illegal immigrants, legal immigrants and temporary visitors), in the U.S. resulted in the redistribution of nine seats. CIS maintains that none of the states that lost seats have had a decline in population. On the contrary, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Utah all had population increases. These nine seats were divided among California, which gained six new seats, and Florida, New York and Texas, each gaining one new seat.

The CIS report also points out the resulting change to the cultural makeup of states with large numbers of immigrants, which in turn further impacts the nature of those states' representation in Congress: “Immigration takes away representation from states composed almost entirely of U.S. citizens and results in the creation of new districts in states with large numbers of non-citizens.”

CIS attributes these ‘problems’ to the fact that the foreign-born population is concentrated in a few states, rather than spread across the U.S. Two-thirds of the immigrant population live in six states. In 2000, the nine states that lost seats had an immigration population ratio of 1:50. In California, one in seven residents is an immigrant, and ten percent of residents in New York, Texas and Florida are immigrants.

The report argues that the presence of a large immigrant population also affects the Presidential election, because Electoral College votes are apportioned according to congressional districts, just like seats in the House.

In the report, CIS says a possible solution to the “problem of citizens losing representation” is to encourage eligible immigrants to naturalize, working on the assumption that if immigrants become naturalized citizens, they will learn English and civics, meaning “immigration-induced reapportionment would not take representation away from citizens.” CIS recommends that the U.S. should reduce the number of immigrants allowed into the country, so as not to affect the redistribution of congressional districts.